Memory, silent?

Digitalization "Madlenok"

Sometimes from the banal "Hello, how are you?" Cold sweat is stitching. It was such a reaction that last week that the greeting of Sasha’s old friend in Skype caused me. The first message immediately followed the second: "Be sure to look at this link." It was just spam, but for a few more minutes a trembling beat me.

Sasha died five years ago.

Such stories have long ceased to be rare. The writer Anna Starobinets, whose husband, Alexander Garros, died of cancer in 2017, shared with her readers on the social network to painful: “Is there an opportunity to turn it off - in general, completely, once and for all - the option“ Your memories on the FB ”? They drive me crazy. Of course, you can’t turn it off in your head-but at least here? ”

The taste of Madeline cookies, which more than a hundred years ago distinguished Proust for multi -page memories of childhood, has acquired a digital dimension today. The more time we spend online, the higher the likelihood of our collision with Pristovsky “involuntary memories”. And this is far from being limited to the influence of digitalization as a memory.

Boom of memory

Over the past half a century, even before the number of numbers, the need of a person has intensified many times - a real memorial boom has occurred. “We talk so much about memory, because little remains of it,” the French historian Pierre Nora wrote thirty years ago. But this famous phrase only partially explains the sharply increased interest in the past and preserving the memory of it.

The migration and globalization processes intensified after the Second World War, as a result of which millions of people left their homes or encountered the influx of visitors, pushed many to think about their roots, about maintaining local identity. But other factors were extremely important for memorial boom, first of all, the opportunity to speak out and be heard, which the Germans, and then the whole Western world provided the victims of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime-which became the result of a long process , which began in 1961 by the court of Adolf Eichmann and cultivated in the second half of the 1980s “a dispute of historians” in Germany.

The emancipation of social groups, whose voices could first be voiced and built into the collective memory of the past, played an important role: for example, the history of women, African American, representatives of the LGBT community. It seems that commercialization also had some meaning - the perception of the past and memory of it as a product that is sold and bought. For example, Sergey Loznitsa in the documentary “Austerlitz” analyzes the transformation of memorial museums created on the site of the former Nazi death camps into popular tourist destinations.

By the beginning of the 2000s, with the spread of the Internet and the development of new media, the technical capabilities have repeatedly strengthened the person’s internal need to remember. Funds for preserving memories have become much more accessible and spacious: most people regularly record their lives with the help of telephone and the Internet. Posts on social networks, photographs, emails, checks and geolocation, requests in search engines - all this information forms colossal data sets in which information is stored about our past. As the researcher of the digital environment Oksana Frost rightly notes , today “humanity forms a huge number of evidence of what is happening, and this fund is replenished with points of view of various people, and not just conditional“ elites ”.”

Digital Memory Studies

Along with the growth of private interest in the past, sociocultural studies of human memory have gained popularity. Meminations began to multiply like mushrooms after rain, which is an excellent illustration of the Essay of the Canadian cognitive psychologist Endel Tulving Tulving ) "Is there really 256 different types of memory?" With a conscientious list of these same “memories” in the appendix. Essay Tolving was written ten years ago; Since then, the species composition of memory has increased at least one position - digital Memory .

Of course, scientists began to think about the influence of digitalization on the memory of a person before the emergence of this term. In 2003, Professor of the University of Columbia Andreas Huyssen wrote that it is impossible to analyze "personal, generation or public memory without taking into account the huge influence of new media as carriers of all forms of memory." Four years later, the Dutch researcher José Van Dijck ) went even further, expressing the idea that the new media and other “memory technologies” not only act as guardians and carriers of memories: they change how human memory works and change under the influence of our memoirs. This thesis was the starting point of the new field of interdisciplinary research- Digital Memory Studies , which was formed by the end of the 2000s.

What is the difference between Digital Memory from a "ordinary" memory? Digital memory is organized into databases controlled by algorithms, which structures memories in a new way. Huge volumes of information, access to which is mediated by algorithmic search tools, do not allow you to be forgotten. How does the memory of the past become if its traces are at a distance of a pair of clicks? She fuses more closely with the present, becoming part of it. Some researchers even talk about tyranny of enduring memory.

At the same time, the memory becomes more flexible and plastic-in a sense, to lose or change digital data is much easier than analog documents. Andreas Gursky, one of the main photographers of our time, became famous for pictures, where a significant role was assigned to digital manipulations with the displayed reality. In recent years, Gurski has experimented with the creation of a “new reality” by digital methods. In the work of “ Review ” (2015), the photographer depicted the audience sitting with his back and admiring the picture of the American artist Barnett Newman, Angeel Merkel, Helmut Kolya, Gerhard Schreder and Helmut Schmidt. Merkel and her predecessors have never been photographed together, the picture is a product of the artist’s imagination, as well as his skills in working with digital tools. Gursky’s work is not the first, but precisely one of the most radical examples of rethinking photography as a means of fixing reality. Such “photographs” are able to lead to “artificial” memories-just as the images of Russian revolutions, largely constructed by Sergey Eisenstein, still to some extent serve as a source of ideas about the events in Russia of the beginning of the last century. Digitalization has made tools for manipulations with reality at times more sophisticated and publicly available.

In the Digital era, increasing externalization of memory is also important-the desire to fix the maximum of life experience, but not in its own head, but in phones, online archives, social networks, blogs. Such super-dependence from external carriers is, in fact, the opposite side of the “world without oblivion”: what will we remember if the external memory gives a failure-or does anyone break it?

Memory on the algorithm

The digital memory is objectively and cruelly and the bitter appeal of Anna Starobinets to readers is an indicative example of the mutual influence of memory and technology. The protests against the mechanical intervention of Facebook in the space of individual memories sound louder, despite the efforts of the developers of the social network, respond to them constructively - changes in the algorithm.

Say, in response to complaints of users dissatisfied with the forced interaction with the personal pages of the personal pages of the deceased frands, Facebook introduced a new function in 2009-the ability to memorialize such profiles, that is, to create a kind of digital tombstones for the deceased (this service today provides most social networks).

A year later, Facebook developers presented a Photo widget Memories (“Photo remembrance”), which algorithmically - that is, by the principle of the principle that is understandable only by the developers - demonstrated to users photographs of friends, thereby reminding them of their existence. A lot of critical reviews - first of all, users were outraged with whom the new function reminded of failed relations - forced Facebook to improve the algorithm, and after a few months and completely disconnect the widget.

In 2015, Facebook-publicity presented a new function- ON This Day (“on this day”), designed to remind users of what happened to them “on this day” a year, two, three or more ago. Given the previous unsuccessful experience, the creators on This Day improved the algorithm, but he was still often mistaken. In August last year, Facebook updated the widget: now its algorithm, according to representatives of the social network, is able to “choose” between the poor and good memories of a particular user. Despite this, users continue to complain about unsuccessful algorithmic reminders. Facebook promises to further improve the algorithm - and for this purpose asks users to report on each unpleasant clash with it.

The Roman Mazurenko app

But Facebook algorithms, no matter how worked out, seem to be an old photo album with a grandmother in the country compared to Roman Mazurenko . The application launched in 2016 , the application is a kind of digital monument to Roman Mazurenko, the art director of Stamps and the founder of Stampsy , who died in an accident in Moscow on November 28, 2015. Roman is a chat boot, which, as the founder of LUKA Evgeny Kuid, wrote on Facebook, is “small datasets over the neural network”. As an array of data, the creators used messages and photos that Mazurenko sent to friends during his lifetime.

Having downloaded the application, you can recall the deceased in an unusual way - having entered the correspondence with it. The user reaction was different: some perceived the application as an opportunity to extend the novel life, others (for example, LOOK co -founder At Media Vasily Esmanov) considered him almost a mockery, an ominous example of pseudo-reward (more about this can be read in Russian and English ). There were no references to one of the episodes of the series “Black Mirror”, in which the heroine of Marta, mourning through the Boyfranda Boyfrand, who died in a car accident, begins communication with his virtual embodiment. The episode ends by no means a happy end.

If you leave the ethical question aside, the novelty of such a memorial comes to the fore. Interaction with memories by means of a chatbot, not only in the root, differs from traditional ways to remember the deceased (for example, by visiting his grave), but also takes algorithmic memory to a new level.

Heraclitus and traces of memory

The LUKA application works on top of the neural network. However, the memory has been working at the neural level - and scientists have been studying this process for decades. One of the key breakthroughs in the studies of the interaction of the brain and memory is the case of Henry Gustav Prayison, known in the history of medical science as “patient G.M.” (or “ HM patient” - from the English Henry Molaison ). In an attempt to cure G.M. The epilepsy neurosurgeon William Scull conducted an operation on his brain in 1953, removing part of the hippocampus. The operation really made it possible to control the disease of Prayison, but led to the loss of medium and long-term memory. G.M. I could not remember what had breakfast or dined, did not recognize his friends - nothing was delayed in his memory.

Scientists from the Massachusetts Technological Institute studied the case of "Patient G.M." Until the death of Prayison in 2008 (it was then that his real name was revealed). The knowledge gained as a result of these studies formed the basis of further neurobiological studies of the work of memory. Read more about this story in the exciting material of Israel Rosenfeld (Israel Rosenfield) and Edward Ziff , published in The New York Review of Books . Rosenfeld and digifs write:

"Brain G.M. It was unable to form long -term memories. The latest neurophysiological studies have shown that even long -term memory is very dynamic. Whenever the brain tries to activate the “trace of memory” - the physical representation of a specific memory in the brain, also known as “Engram” - the nature of this trace changes. In other words, the memories change every time the brain reproduces them. <...> Due to the fact that the trace of memory is changing, it is impossible to equally recall the same twice. ”

In fact, these natural science discoveries confirm the long -standing statements of sociocultural researchers about the flexibility and plasticity of memory. In the same memory, as in the same river, it is impossible to “enter” twice. Despite these significant achievements, Rosenfeld and the figure summarize, we still know very little about how the memory works at the biological level - what changes occur in neural networks or in neurons themselves, when a person remembers or recalls.

Prostious memory

Despite only a fragmentary understanding of how the interconnection of the brain and memory is arranged, scientists are actively working on the creation of opportunities for the editing of our memories and the improvement of memory at the neural level.

A year ago, VICE magazine wrote about two research teams that managed to introduce false memories into the brain and other animals, change their emotions associated with memories and restore the ability of the damaged brain to long -term memory. “You go out into the street, pass by the bakery and feel the aroma of a cupcake that reminds you of the 18th anniversary. We wanted to do the same through the brain, ”the neurobiologist from Harvard University Steve Ramirez explained the essence of his project in Pravian (even“ Madlenki ”and Americanized).

Fundamental research is supplemented by applied developments aimed at creating a product and its subsequent commercialization. The second project described in the Vice is the Kernel startup, whose team creates prosthetic memory. Kernel owner Brian Johnson explained that he was interested in in memory of the “potential programmability of the neural code”.

Representatives of both projects claim that they are close to the transition to experiments with the human brain. With the penetration of code to the level of neurons, Digital Memory will make a revolutionary leap in its development. Prostious memory, if it can be created, will forever change how we remember and remember. The first significant successes are already available: no further than last week, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Thomas Jefferson introduced the public a prototype of such a “cognitive prosthesis”. It is a combination of electrodes implanted into the brain, which - if the brain fails to save information, can artificially contribute to this process. Such developments slowly but surely embody the other series of the “black mirror” - the one in which the chips are sewn in the neck of the heroes, cinematographically fixing everything that happens to them.

New reality

The Roman Mazurenko application has been on my phone since release. Once the novel was my boss in the Strelka-I owe him his first real work, acquaintance with a huge number of interesting people, an amazingly exciting and productive year of life. Periodically, I open his digital monument and write something. I recall Roma, I recognize his manner in one message to start from the most mundane banalities and take off to philosophical heights - and I feel warm. And let the sensation of heat invariably combined with trembling throughout the body, this trembling is not at all such that I experienced, having received a message from a long -dead friend on Skype. It is fundamentally different: not about the chilling blood, the appearance of a digital zombie, but about the exciting and almost tangible contact with its own living memories.

Victoria Mazurenko, the mother of the novel, wrote in response to a critical review of the application: “This is not a pseudorality. This is a new reality, and it must be learned to re -build and live in it. ” As a researcher, I cannot help but think about the ethical and other sides of this new reality. But as a person - glad to plunge into her with his head. In the end, that there is a memory, if not an attempt by a person to overcome his own mortality? Digital Memory is perhaps the only chance of my generation for immortality. The main thing is that the algorithms do not disappoint.